Lord McLoughlin
Main Page: Lord McLoughlin (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord McLoughlin's debates with the Department for Education
(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)
Is there any way to see whether pupils are being let down by their schools, other than seeing that they are not getting up to certain standards?
Damian Hinds
No, not in the same way. Standardised assessment is part of a suite of methods that we use, and Ofsted inspection is, of course, another very important part. The fact is that before we had standardised assessment, there were individual schools and, indeed, substantial parts of the country where children could have been let down not for one or a few years but for many years, and nothing was done about it, starting with the problem that nobody knew about it. SATs are a very important part of our architecture to raise attainment and, critically, to narrow the gap in performance between the rich and the poor.